H-Town Future Shock: Solanges When I Get Home
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The 19-song track project is the follow-up to her universally lauded 2016 album A Seat At the Table whose lead single “Cranes in the Sky” won the 2017 Grammy for Best R&B Performance. It features a long list of guest artists, including past collaborators like Dev Hynes and Sampha, as well as some more unexpected features like Tyler The Creator, Playboi Carti, and Gucci Mane. As if willed into existence by our collective despair, Solange surprise-released her fourth album, When I Get Home, last night right at the intersection of Black History Month ending and Women’s History Month beginning.
Solange has shared the director's cut of her short film, 'When I Get Home,' which features new scenes and music. The album blends "cosmic" jazz, hip hop, and R&B, and has also been described as psychedelic soul, "new-age trap", and a "drowsy funk throwdown". It is also influenced by chopped and screwed hip hop originating from Solange's hometown of Houston, as well as drum and bass. The album has been described as an ode to Houston's hip hop scene, and is narrated by a range of sampled African-American women from its Third Ward, where Solange grew up.
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The extended director’s cut of her short film, When I Get Home, which features additional scenes and a new song. Fresh off the release of her highly anticipated fourth studio album, When I Get Home, the Grammy-nominated singer dropped an accompanying short film Friday . The director's cut of Solange's art film, When I Get Home, is now streaming on the Criterion Channel in honor of its two-year anniversary. There will be more online activations throughout the week on the singer's BlackPlanet page to continue the celebration too. You can reimmerse yourself in Solange’s visual work of art by way of the new director’s cut on Criterion Channel‘s official website.
The video references the Houston rapper Mike Jones and his well-known cell phone number. She also set up a page on BlackPlanet, a social networking website aimed at African Americans, and shared teaser images for the album on the site. When I Get Home springs from the Houston of Solange’s third eye, deeply connected, specific, rooted, enigmatic, and experiential. It reflects the varied cosmopolitan experiences she had growing up and her current protective, nurturing embrace of Houston and her home state. A heartbreakingly beautiful film collage, it takes the best attributes of remix culture and applies them to Houston’s architecture styles, from row houses to colonial revival mansions to postmodern ‘80s downtown skyscrapers to the Renzo Piano-designed Menil Collection, which she grew up visiting and where she recently performed. The film is first and foremost an ode to Blackness and Black collectivity, and expressly Black female collectivity, within a uniquely African American experience.
Solange Takes Over BlackPlanet To Tease New Project
On the day of the album’s release, Solange also announced a companion film to When I Get Home on her Twitter. When I Get Home features a wide range of collaborators including big names such as Pharrell and Tyler, the Creator, underground artists such as ABRA and Standing on the Corner and even experimental pop artist Panda Bear of Animal Collective fame. Solange produced the album alongside a variety of collaborators, including John Key, John Carroll Kirby, Standing on the Corner, Chassol, Jamire Williams, and Pharrell Williams. The album also features contributions from several high-profile musicians, including Sampha, Playboi Carti, Gucci Mane, Panda Bear, Tyler, the Creator, Metro Boomin, The-Dream, Abra, Dev Hynes, Steve Lacy, Earl Sweatshirt, and Scarface.
The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy. The intro to this interlude is a sample of an old YouTube video of Atlanta rappers Diamond and Princess (from Crime Mob, of “Knuck If You Buck” fame) fake-interviewing each other in the back of a car. Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. The album is a love-letter to Solange’s home town, Houston, Texas, and is narrated by various African-American women whom she grew up with.
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When viewed through the lens of these terrifying yet pregnant times, it becomes even clearer that the work is daring us—Solange is daring us—to reckon with and celebrate the past and the future. Houston, with its multitude of American microcosms, is where Solange Knowles was born in 1986, the year of the first FotoFest Biennial. The city stands in for so much in contemporary culture, and especially for Black America, whose fate is intertwined with that of everyone’s on this planet. Solange has unveiled the extended director’s cut of her short film, When I Get Home, which features additional scenes and a new song.
The album is a mixture of R&B, the Houston style of ‘chopped and screwed’ hip-hop, and cosmic jazz. Contains a sample of the recording "I Hope You Really Love Me" performed by Family Circle, written by Charles Simmons, Jr; used courtesy of The Numero Group. "Exit Scott" contains a sample from "Poem to Ann #2" as written and performed by Pat Parker; used courtesy of Sinister Wisdom and The Olivia Companies. "Binz"contains samples from "Didn't Want to Have to Do It" as performed by Rotary Connection, written by John Sebastian; used courtesy of Universal Music Enterprises. "We Deal with the Freak'n" contains samples from "Turn Me On" as performed by Rotary Connection, written by Sidney Barnes and Greg Perry; used courtesy of Universal Music Enterprises. "Dreams"contains a sample from "No" as written and performed by Duval Timothy; used courtesy of Carrying Colour.
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The film also premiered on Solange’s Black Planet page, a sly nod to recent history and one that forecasted our current pandemic-era “virtual” cultural paradigm. Solange premiered the film in nine local venues for members of the Black Houston community including "her mother's old hair salon; Unity National Bank, the only black owned Texas banking institution; and Emancipation Gym, the only public park open to African Americans in the Jim Crow era." In a year-end essay for Slate, Ann Powers cited When I Get Home as proof that the format is not dead but rather undergoing a "metamorphosis", with artists such as Solange utilizing the concept album through the culturally-relevant autobiographical narratives.
It’s already been two years since the release of Solange Knowles’ When I Get Home. To celebrate her fourth studio album’s debut, the Grammy award-winning visual artist has teamed up with the Criterion Channel to exclusively premiere a remastered director’s cut of its accompanying art film. As icing on the anniversary cake, a series of digital activations will go down this week on her Black Planet page and feature art installations created over the years, a digital collage of fan images and testimonial stories curated by Solo, along with special performances and screenings. She peppers rural and suburban landscapes with Afrofuturistic imagery and orchestrates a glorious, ceremonial union of Black people in monochrome outfits, herded with elaborate choreography. On Thursday, the 32-year-old singer, songwriter, multi-disciplinary artist surprised released her latest studio album When I Get Home.
Like her previous, groundbreaking album A Seat at the Table, Home is a rich tableau of collaboration, black history, and references to her Houston upbringing (the homeward destination implied by the collection’s title), but the album takes even more experimental risks with her sound. Among the mix of artists involved are Gucci Mane, Dev Hynes, Earl Sweatshirt, Cassie and … a viral Atlanta public-access sexpert? “When I first started creating “When I Get Home” I was quite literally fighting for my life…” reflected the singer-songwriter in an Instagram post commemorating the momentous occasion. Perhaps no performance artist in recent history has paid such exquisite tribute to her hometown as Solange with her 2019 film and album When I Get Home.
The film accompanies all seventeen tracks in one continuous narrative or visual album with various aspects dedicated to Houston's history including its hip-hop scene, for instance, the chopped and screwed remix style and mixtapes of DJ Screw. The 17th track "Sound of Rain" is accompanied by a surreal, game-world animation akin to Second Life that features original artwork by Satterwhite. Elsewhere, Solange chops and screws her own voice on When I Get Home, like a modern-day version of scatting—listen for it. The album builds off her previous and third album A Seat at the Table, which was inspired by the poet Claudia Rankine’s opus Citizen. The music video for “Cranes in the Sky” from A Seat at the Table was shot by Director of Photography Arthur Jafa, who is one of our era’s most prominent chroniclers of Black America in films like Dreams are Colder Than Death and Love is the Message, The Message is Death.
The footage is accompanied by a new song, “Dreams (Demo/2),” an alternate version of the When I Get Home track, which boasts a funkier, more effervescent groove. The 41-minute director's cut of the film was released on all platforms on December 12, 2019. The director's cut features new sequences, as well as a previously unreleased track titled "Dreams ". A limited edition DVD of the director's cut was sold on the album's one-year anniversary, among other merchandise items, through her BlackPlanet page. On the album's second anniversary, the remastered film began streaming through the Criterion Channel.
Like A Seat at the Table, Solange gave us little time to prepare for When I Get Home, mostly because sharing her art makes her antsy; drawing out the process would only make it worse. (“I have this fear living in my body about releasing work,” she told the Times. “I don’t know any artist that doesn’t feel that before they hit the send button.”) Instead, Solange reemerged on — of all places — BlackPlanet, bringing back from the presumed dead one of the original social-media platforms that was created specifically by and for black people. She launched her own page with lyric excerpts and a dossier of new images, both still and moving, that appear to be pieces of a larger visual project.
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Solange released her new album, When I Get Home, today after a rollout that lasted just one day. She followed the album release up by putting out its accompanying “Texas film” exclusively on Apple Music. The short film includes her entire new album, complete with richly realized visuals. The director’s cut of When I Get Home most notably boasts a new credits sequence, in which a group of people dressed in yellow robes move in unison around what looks like a rodeo arena/high art installation.
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